Bluestacks 5 - The PC/Mobile gamer's best secret weapon.

 Hello everyone, it's Severus here again. I'm here to tell you all, that I've found something that if you don't already know about, it is going to blow your mind. I was sitting at home the other day and I was on my PC and I really felt like a game of Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition (A Dungeons and Dragons classic) when I realized that I did not own that game on Steam, but had purchased it on the Google Play store, with ALL the DLC, but now I had no access to it. It was on Android. Then I remembered Bluestacks! Around three or four years ago I had stumbled onto Bluestacks when I wanted to play Stellar Wanderer by Crescent Moon games I think it was. I had Elite Dangerous fever but I had not yet saved up enough to buy the game with all the DLC that was available, and so I played it's smaller, simpler, counterpart Stellar Wanderer. But it was horrible on a small phone screen and so I started looking for ways to play Android games on the big PC screen. And I found Bluestacks. I even mentioned it to the dev of Stellar Wanderer, on Google Play in a review of the game, and he said he would also check it out. Corey I think his name was. Anyway, I digress.

Neverwinter Nights. I looked on Steam and considered buying it again when I remembered Bluestacks. I typed it into the Google search engine, "Bluestacks free download" and off it went. But what I got was much better than the old Bluestacks I had come to know and love. It had been worked on. Immensely. And it was still completely FREE! Bluestacks 5 had improved the program in lots of ways. It was a bit disorientating at first, getting to know how to use the new interface and features, but most of the old stuff was still there. I did however encounter 1 small  problem where Windows 10 Home version does not allow the use of Hyper-V. The Windows 10 virtualization technology is called Hyper-V. To enable virtualization in Windows 10, usually you enable the Hyper-V optional feature through the BIOS but it appears that Windows 10 Home edition does not support this function. However if you go into >Task Manager>Performance you can see if the Hyper-V technology is supported and mine says it is. But when I look for the option to activate it, I cannot find it.

                                                                                                Virtualization: Disabled

                                                                                                 Hyper-V support:  Yes

Apart from this small issue, I noticed the Bluestacks 5 program works wonderfully and it has enabled me to play Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced edition that I purchased on the Google Play store on my modest 32GB RAM i7 in wonderful large widescreen WITH full Joypad support.

And for that I am grateful. So I decided to write this blog for you all.

Bluestacks, it's great and it's completely FREE.

Your gaming correspondent from down under, Sydney Australia, Severus40k, signing off.

25/10/2021